How to make a 3-D sim scanner of your sim

In this article, I'll show you how to use free tools to create your very own Sim
Scanner, with realistic topography and moving people indicators.
We'll be combining a free sim scanner with your sims topography with moving,
stirrable flash water.

You can come to my sim, Phaze Demesnes, and take a copy of the free sim scanner.
It is full mod, copy, and transfer. Change the sim texture to your
own sim, and off you go. Instructions are located in the section to
Get Your Own Sim Map.

If you want to know how to make it from scratch,
here is a list of what you need to do:

You'll need to make two prims. Put my
flash water
script inside it, and color it light blue with a transparency of about
25-33%. I colored the sides blue at first, with no transparency, and I made the
top partly transparent as shown in these two images. Then I decided steell would
look better against the blue.

Click image to zoom in

The textures for regular viewers are a water textures, and steel band around the
edges, with a little blue color. You will need to offset the texture
by 0.6 vertically to eliminate the blank band from the water script. I
made my water prim with tapered edges of about 0.12, and it was 3.9 X 3.9
X .38 meters tall.

The next part is courtesy of Zeja Pyle. Go to
Bashora.com (link opens in a new window) and teleport to the store in
Nonacho. Grab a copy of the free Geoscanner from the 1st floor (you tp to
the top floor).

Go on your region, and rez it in an area where the script is allowed. You
can also wear it, or attach to your screen as a HUD, but try to not move during
the scan.

Click the Geoscanner box to start. It will announce in chat "GEO-SCAN STARTED!".
This will take about 1 minute. When done, the prim will announce: "GEO-SCAN
COMPLETED!"
Once you have scanned your sim, navigate back to Bashora.com and locate your sim
in the database.

Note: The LSL and PHP scripts have a small bug: Any sim name with a space in it will
be stripped out. Someone forgot to llEscape(). The link that is spoken in world won't work
if your sim has spaces in the name. You can still navigate to your sim by removing the space. In my case, the link
was http://geosculpties.bashora.com?index.php?name=Phaze Demesnes, and it should
be http://geosculpties.bashora.com?index.php?name=PhazeDemesnes
because that's the way the server stored it.

Zeja uses HTML tables to make the topography image (I wish Zeta coded
this in Imagemagic, but that's another story). You will not be able to
right click and save the image map! All you will get is a single pixel. Once you have located your
sim, you'll need to press the Alt-Print Screen key combination. Use any
image editing tool you want, paste the screen grab in the image editor. Zoom in and crop down
to the sculpt image of your sim. Once you have that image, upload it to Second
Life.

This is the resulting sculpt image I cropped from the screen grab of Zeja Pyles database:

You'll need one more image: But wait! You have 3 choices:

1) Image from the maps
2) Image of the topography map
3) Image taken with a snapshot

1) The image of your sim seen in color, from this search:

Enter any sim name here:

2) You can use just the Topography image from this search:

Enter any sim name here:

Once you have a image, save it to your hard disk,
and upload it to Second Life.

This is my sim, Phaze Demesnes, with the textures of all objects showing from
the first search:

&

You may not like the way Second Life map servers mash all the values of the
images together. The system does not use the textures to make a map,
instead, it used the average value of all the pixels in a texture to make the
image. So you can use the color image, or use the image of just the
topography from Ferd's database.

The best method is to screen grab an image from well above your sim.

3) Fly to about 128,128 at an altitude of about 350 meters above your sim.Click
Ctrl-P and set you Graphics draw distance up to at least 512 meters.
(This could take a while) Wait until you can see the sim clearly below you. You will
need flight assist to get that high, so wear a flight feather or a flight band.

One you are there, press ESC-M to go into Mouse Look mode. Swivel your camera
down until the sim image is squarely in view:

Press ALT-Print Screen, and paste the image in any image editor and cut carefully around the sim edge,
as I have done with Phaze Demsnes:

Upload the sculpt and the sim image, and put the sculpt on the Sculpt map image.

Be sure you click the toggle to set the Sculpt map to type = Plane

Click image to zoom in

Now add the prim image to the texture tab:

Click image to zoom in

Lower the top prim and adjust the water level:

Click image to zoom in

If you are in Viewer 2, make sure that the water can be stirred with your mouse:

Here's a way to add a nice touch: Hover text arrows:

Add this simple script to a prim, and put in the Description (not the name) the name you want
to appear. The photo below shows the "Isle of View".

Now, teleport to Phaze Demesne and grab a copy of the free Sim Scanner from the
middle of the dome. If you want to make your own sim scanner from scripts,
look in my free script collection for all the scripts and instructions.

Now that you have the sim scanner, you'll need to follow these steps in sequence:

1) Rez the Sim Scanner.

A square, thin prim will appear.

2) Click the Sim Scanner prim. You will get a menu:

3) Click SetTarget and click the 3X3X5 option to match the
dimensions you have used so far. You can make it larger or smaller and
resize your map to fit.

4) Click doScan! and it will run a scan and rez a small yellow
cone for every avatar.

Nothing happens:? It looks stuck? You renamed it. If you
change the name, you also need to change the name in scanner script.

5) Click setUpdate and pick an interval. I usually run at +300
seconds (5 minutes)

6) Move your 3-D Map on top of the scanner, make it transparent, and link
it as the last prim. I put mine just above the water level so that the
cones will appear in the correct place.